Page 32

He howls like a wolf in a trap.

He folds sideways and grabs at the hole I put in him, as if his hands can keep the blood where it belongs. Of course, they cannot.

“The deal still stands,” I say. I wait for the howl to break into breath. “All I need is an address for Tito Lucci.”

The man shakes his head. Sweat and blood. Eyes bright with pain and the last of his pride.

“No. I’ll never talk, Pakev scum…”

I shoot him in the other leg. This scream is worse. He writhes on the boards, a wet, broken thing, and still he does not give me the name I already know I may have to find another way.

Mackensie glances at me.

I glance back.

No words. The nod is enough. The soldiers move. They work quickly…

A weight around the man’s waist. Chain. Iron. The kind of simple mathematics the river understands.

I watch as they haul him toward the end of the pier. His hands scrape wood. He tries to kick and there is nothing left to kick with.

We follow, move closer. The city glitters across the black water as if this is someone else’s night. I stop at the edge.

“Last chance,” I say.

He looks up at me with the one eye that still works. “Fuck you.”

I give the signal. The soldiers push. There is a splash that is smaller than the life deserves. Then the river closes. For a second I see pale cloth. Then nothing. The weight does what weights do.

Mackensie stands beside me with his hands in his coat. The soldiers step back and wait. They know not to speak first.

I watch the place where the man went in.

The surface settles. A little foam, nothing else. Then only the ordinary movement of a dirty river that has taken better men and worse.

“We’ll keep working the weak links,” Mackensie says. “Someone will want to live more than he did.”

“We do not have forever,” I say. The wind comes off the water and finds the gap in my collar. “Every day Tito breathes is a day he spends buying another rat. Another politician. Another piece of trash street hustler wanting to make a name for himself. I want him found. I want his brothers found. I want their money taken and their streets ruined. Piece by piece.”

Mackensie nods. “The West Coast jet landed,” he adds. “Our general is on the ground. Maxim’s people took the help. Nikolai’s too. The siege is done, but there is clean up to do, loose ends to tie.”

“Good.”

Loyalty is a seed. You plant it in blood and hope the other man waters it when you need a gun. I take out my phone again.

The boy is a different kind of problem.

This was work, but the boy is somewhere between work and pleasure. I put the phone away.

“Leave him to the water,” I say. “If the current brings anything up, I do not want it wearing my name. Make sure the guards understand that.”

“They understand,” Mackensie says.

We turn from the edge. The walk back to the SUV is the same silence as the walk out.

Some nights need language. This one needed an example.

I pause with my hand on the door and look once more at the city across the water. It does not excite me the way it did when I was a boy with a Coke in a park and a father who still had one more day to live. It does not have to. Excitement is for people who have not yet learned what the lights cost.